Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices Page 5

  “No, he’s going to send us a letter. I guess we’re going to see the sights on the way to Massachusetts.”

  Rebecca slips her feet out of her sneakers and presses her toes against the front window. Frost halos form around her pinkies. “That doesn’t make any sense. Daddy will find us by then.”

  “Daddy will look for the shortest distance between two points, don’t you think? He wouldn’t head for Gila Bend, he’d head for Vegas.” I am impressed with myself-Vegas was a shot in the dark for me, but from Rebecca’s face I can tell I have given a more direct location.

  “What if there’s no letter? What if this takes us forever?” She scrunches down in the seat so that her neck folds into several chins. “What if they find us, weeks from now, dying of dysentery or lice or heartworm in the back seat of a Chevy wagon?”

  “Humans don’t get heartworm. I don’t think.”

  I catch Rebecca staring at my wrists, which rest against the large steering wheel. They have flowered into bruises, saffron and violet, like big bangle bracelets that cannot be removed. “Well,” I say quietly, “you should see what his cheek looks like.”

  She slides across the seat and cranes her neck to see the driver’s perspective. “I hope I never have to.” She is beautiful at almostfifteen. Rebecca has straw-straight yellow hair that springs to the crest of her shoulders; her summer skin is the color of hazelnuts. And her eyes are the strangest combination of Oliver’s blue and my grey-they are a violent sort of green, like the hue of a computer screen, transparent, alarming. She is in this for the adventure. She hasn’t considered what it means to leave your father behind, for a little while or forever. What she sees is the drama-the explosion, the slamming doors, the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to live out the plot of a youngadult novel. I cannot say I blame her, and I cannot condone bringing her along. But leaving her behind was not a viable alternative.

  I’m crazy about her. Since day one, she has depended on me, and, remarkably, I have yet to let her down.

  “Mom,” Rebecca says, annoyed. “Earth to Mom.”

  I smile at her. “Sorry.”

  “Can we pull over?” She looks at her watch, a leather and gold Concord, a gift from Oliver several Christmases ago. “It’s only ninethirty, and we’ll be there by midnight, and I really need to pee.”

  I don’t know how Rebecca has figured on midnight, but she’s been calculating with a ruler and a little road map she found wedged in the back seat. Geography, Mom, she told me. We all have to take it in Social Studies.

  We pull aside when the road develops a shoulder and lock up the car. I go with Rebecca into the woods to go to the bathroom- I’m not about to let her out on the side of the road in the middle of night. We hold hands and try not to step on poison ivy. “Nice out,” Rebecca says, as she is peeing. I’m holding her forearms for balance. “Isn’t it warmer than usual?”

  “I forget you’re a California girl. I have no idea if it’s warmer than usual. Usual on the East Coast is fifty-five degrees at night.”

  “What am I going to use?” Rebecca says, and I look at her blankly. “Toilet paper?”

  “I don’t know.” She reaches for leaves on the ground and I grab her wrist. “No! You don’t know what that stuff is; it could be sumac, or God knows what, and that’s the last thing you need: not to be able to sit on a driving trip cross-country.”

  “So what do I do?”

  I will not leave her alone. “Sing,” I tell her.

  “What?”

  “Sing. You sing and I’ll run up to the car for a tissue and if I hear you stop singing I know you’re in trouble.”

  “That’s stupid,” Rebecca says. “This is Arizona, not L.A. No one’s out here.”

  “All the more reason.” Rebecca stares at me, incredulous, and then begins to sing a rap song. “No,” I tell her, “sing something I know, something where I know the order so I won’t get confused.”

  “I don’t believe this. What’s in your repertoire, Mom?” She loses her balance for a moment, and stumbles, cursing.

  I think for a moment, but there is little we have in common in the realm of music. “Try the Beach Boys,” I suggest, figuring that after fifteen years in California something has to stick.

  “Well, the East Coast girls are hip,” Rebecca warbles, “I really dig those clothes they wear . . .”

  “That’s great,” I say, “and the northern girls?”

  “With the way they kiss . . .”

  I sing with her, walking backwards as far as I can, calling on her to raise the volume of her voice as I get farther and farther away. When she forgets the words, she sings syllables, da-da-da. When I can see the car I break into a run, and find a tissue that I’d used to blot lipstick, and bring it back to Rebecca.

  “I wish they all could be California girls,” she says, as I run up to her. “You see? No one came near me.”

  “Better safe than sorry.”

  We lie down on the hood of the Chevy, our backs on the slope of the windshield. I try to listen for the bends of the Colorado River, which we passed several miles back. Rebecca tells me she is going to try to count the stars.

  We pass the last Yodel between us like a joint, taking smaller and smaller bites at the end so that neither one of us will be accused of finishing it. We argue about whether or not a helicopter’s lights are a shooting star (no) and if Cassiopeia is out at this time of year (yes). When the cars are not passing us, it is almost quiet, save for the hum of the vibrating highway.

  “I wonder what it is like here during the day,” I say aloud.

  “Probably a lot like it is now. Dusty, red. Hotter.” Rebecca takes the Yodel out of my fingers. “You want it?” She pops it into her mouth and squashes it against her front teeth with her tongue. “I know, disgusting. You think it gets really hot here, hot like in L.A., where the roads breathe when you step on them?”

  Together we stare at the sky, as if we are waiting for something to happen.

  “You know,” Rebecca says, “I think you’re taking all this really well.”

  I lean up on one elbow. “You think?”

  “Yeah. Really. I mean, you could be falling apart, you know?

  You could be the type who doesn’t stop crying, or who won’t drive on highways.”

  “Well I can’t be,” I say, honestly, “I have to take care of you.”

  “Take care of me? I can take care of myself.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” I say, laughing, and I’m only half joking. It is easy to see that in two or three years this daughter of mine will be a knockout. This year in school she read Romeo and Juliet, and she told me pragmatically that Romeo was a wimp. He should have just taken Juliet and run away with her, swallowed his pride and worked at some medieval McDonald’s. What about the poetry, I asked her. What about the tragedy? And Rebecca told me that that’s all very well and good but it isn’t the way things happen in real life.

  “Please,” Rebecca says, “You’re getting that weepy cow look again.”

  I would like to lie here for days with my daughter, watching her grow up in front of me, but since I am running away from my own problems I don’t have that luxury. “Come on,” I say, nudging her off the hood of the car. “You can hang your head out the window while we drive and finish counting.”

  By the time we reach the signs for Gila Bend the soil turns brick red, veined with night shadows of cacti. The sides of the road level around us so that it seems we should be able to see the town and yet there is nothing but dust. Rebecca twists around in her seat to double-check that we have read the green sign correctly. “So where is this place?”

  We travel several miles without seeing traces of a civilized town. Finally I pull to the side of the road and turn off the ignition. “We could always sleep in the car,” I tell Rebecca. “It’s warm enough.”

  “No chance! There are coyotes and things here.”

  “This coming from the girl who was willing to go to bathroom with all the luna
tics hiding in the woods?”

  “May I help you?”

  The sound startles us; for three and a half hours we have heard only the patterns of each other’s voices. Standing beside Rebecca’s window is a woman with a tattered grey braid hanging down her back. “Car trouble?”

  “I’m sorry. If this is your property, we can move the car.”

  “Why bother,” the woman says, “no one else has.” She tells us that we have come to the Indian Reservation in Gila Bend, the smaller one, and points out furry lavender shapes in the distance that indeed are houses. “There’s a larger reservation about six miles east, but the tourist traps are here.” Her name is Hilda, and she invites us to her apartment.

  She lives in a two-story brick building that smells like a dormitory--federally subsidized housing, she explains. She has left all the lights on, and it is only when we are inside that I realize she has been carrying a paper bag. I expect her to pull out gin, whiskey-I have heard stories-but she takes out a carton of milk and offers to make Rebecca an egg cream.

  On the walls are woven mats in all the colors of the southwestern-rainbow, and charcoal drawings of bulls and canyons. “What do you think of her,” I ask Rebecca, when Hilda is in the makeshift bathroom/kitchen.

  “Honest?” Rebecca says, and I nod. “Well, I can’t believe you’re here. Have you lost your mind? It’s midnight, and some person you’ve never seen in your life comes up to the car, and says, Hey, come to my place, and she’s an Indian to boot, and you just pick up your things and go. Whatever happened to never taking candy from strangers?”

  “Egg creams,” I say. “She hasn’t offered us candy.”

  “Jesus.”

  Hilda comes out with a wicker tray that carries three foamy glasses and ripe plums. She holds one up and tells us they are grown locally by her step-brother. I thank her, sipping at my egg cream. “So tell me how you came to be on Dog Forked Road at midnight.”

  “Is that what we were on?” I turn to Rebecca. “I thought it was Route Eight.”

  “We turned off Route Eight,” Rebecca says. She turns to Hilda. “It’s a long story.”

  “I have all the time in the world. I’m an insomniac. That’s what I was doing on Dog Forked Road at midnight. Milk’s the only thing to soothe my heartburn.”

  I nod sympathetically. “We’ve come from California. I guess you could say we’ve run away from home.” I try to laugh, to make light of the situation, but I can see this woman whom I hardly know staring at the bruises on my wrists.

  “I see,” she says.

  Rebecca asks if there is some place she can lie down, and Hilda excuses herself to fix up a fold-out couch in the other room. She collects pillows from one closet and sheets colored with Peanuts characters from the kitchen pantry. “Get some sleep, Mom,” Rebecca says, sitting beside me on the loveseat. “I worry about you.” Hilda ushers her into the bedroom, and from my angle I can see Rebecca slip in between the sheets, sighing the way you do when you run your ankles along all the cool spots. Hilda stands in the doorway until my daughter falls asleep, and then she steps back and presents me with Rebecca’s face, in profile, lit silver and traced with the grace of the moon.

  10 JOLEY

  Dear Jane-

  Do you remember when I was four and you were eight, when Mama and Daddy took us to the circus? Daddy bought us small flashlights with red tips that we could swing around and around when the clowns came out, and peanuts-so many! the shells we stuffed in our pockets. We saw a lady stick her head inside the jaws of a tiger; and a man dive into a small bucket from a place way up in the air that I thought must be Heaven. We saw brown-skinned midgets flipping over each other, catapulted by ordinary seesaws like the one in our backyard, and Mama said, Now don’t you two do this at home. And Mama held Daddy’s hand when the acrobats did their most difficult trick, swinging on a silver trapeze and locking in midair like mating falcons for just a moment, before they grabbed another trapeze and went separate ways. I missed the trick because I was so busy looking at Mama’s hand; the way her fingers twisted between Daddy’s as if they had a right to be there; her diamond engagement ring holding all the colors I had ever seen.

  Then there was a kind of intermission, do they call it that at a circus? And a man in a green coat began to mill through our seating section, peering into the faces of the children. And suddenly a woman was standing in front of me, calling TOM! TOM! and pointing. She bent down and told Mama I was the most adorable little boy she’d ever seen, ever. And Mama said that’s why she named me Joley, after joli -French for “pretty”-as if Mama fancied herself to be French. And then the man in the green coat came over and squatted down. He said, Boy, would you like to ride on an elephant? Mama said that you were my sister and that one couldn’t go without the other, and they gave you a quick once-over and said, Well, all right, if that’s that, but the boy sits up front. They took us backstage (there’s another word-is there a backstage at the circus?), and we crunched peanut shells with the toes of our shoes until a lady wearing sequins all over her body picked us up one by one and told us to straddle the elephant.

  Sheba (that was the name of the elephant) moved in sections, in quarters. Her right front hunched forward, then her right rear. Left front, left rear. Her skin felt like soft cardboard and the hair sticking through her saddle itched my legs. Then we entered the ring, me sitting in front of you. Flash cubes popped and a thundering announcer, a man I thought was God, told everyone our names and ages. I saw washes of color spinning by in the audience. I tried to find Mama and Daddy. You held me tight around the ribs. You said, I don’t want you to fall off.

  If you are reading this you’ve made it to Gila Bend and I’m sure you’ve gotten yourself a good meal and a decent night’s rest. When you leave the P.O. you’ll see an apothecary on your right. The owner of the store is named Joe. Ask him how to get to Route 17. You’re heading towards the Grand Canyon. It’s something you ought to see. Tell Joe I sent you, and he’ll set you straight.

  It’s an eight-hour drive. Same thing: Find a place to stay and go to the P.O. in the morning-the one closest to the northernmost point of the canyon. There’ll be a letter waiting to take you somewhere else.

  About the circus: They took pictures of us riding that elephant, but you never knew. One where most of your face was hidden became the poster for Ringling Bros. the next year. It came in the mail when you were at school; I had been let out early from kindergarten. Mama showed me and wanted to hang it up on the wall of my bedroom. My pretty boy, she called me. I wouldn’t let her hang it up. I couldn’t stand seeing your hands around my waist but your face lost in the shadows. In the end she threw it out, or she said she did. She sat me down and said that I had been given my looks by God and that I’d have to get used to it. I told her, flat out, that I didn’t understand. They made me ride up front because of how I look, I told her. But don’t they know Jane is the beautiful one?

  Love to you and Rebecca.

  Joley

  11 REBECCA July 29, 1990

  A clamshell of color snaps open and shut several inches from my face flashes lights and the sounds of animals that are dying what has happened I ask you what has happened? sometimes it comes to me times like this when the world has turned black and white sometimes it comes and it will not leave it does not leave no matter how many times I scream or I pray.

  I saw people ripped in two flesh split like broken dolls in what used to be an aisle outside the sky had shattered and the world which I had always imagined as soft cotton blue was angry and stained with pain.

  Do you see I had witnessed the end of the world I saw heaven and earth trade places I knew where devils came from I was so young at three and a half with the weight of my life on my brow I knew for sure my head would burst.

  At the end of it all row nine sailed inches away like a glider in the night and over its rotten edge I watched the fireworks diamond glass explosions and in spite of myself I started to cry.

  There is a sound
that the mute make when they are murdered I learned this years later on the evening news their vocal cords cannot vibrate so what the listener hears instead is the air quivering pushing in pushing out a wall of silence this is the voice of terror in a vacuum.

  For days I have felt a leopard crouching on my chest. I breathe in the stale air it exhales. It scratches at the inside of my chin and it kisses my neck. When it shifts its weight, my own ribs move.

  “She’s coming to,” I hear, the first words in a long time.

  I open my eyes and see in this order: my mother, my father, and the tiny attic room of the Big House. I squeeze my eyes shut. Something isn’t right: I have been expecting the house in San Diego. I have forgotten entirely about Massachusetts.

  I try to sit up but the leopard screams and claws at me.

  “What’s the matter with her?” my father is saying. “Help her, Jane. What’s the matter.” My mother presses cold towels against my forehead but does not notice this monster at all.

  “Can’t you see it,” I say, but it comes out a whisper. I am drowning in fluid. I cough and phlegm comes up, and keeps coming. My father holds tissues into my palm. My mother is crying. Neither one of them understands that if the leopard will just move, I will be fine.

  “We’re going to go home,” my father says. “We’re getting out of here.”

  He is wearing the wrong clothes, the wrong face to be on this farm. I search my mother’s face for an answer to this. “Let me be with her a minute, Oliver.”

  “We need to work this out together,” my father says.

  My mother puts her hand on his shoulder. It looks cool, like a ladyslipper or a corner of the hayloft. “Please.”

  The hayloft. “Tell me this,” I say. I try to sit up. “Hadley is dead.”

  My mother and father look at each other and without a word my father leaves the room. “Yes,” my mother says. Her eyes spill over with tears. “I’m so sorry, Rebecca.” She reaches across the heart-sewn quilt. She buries her face in the cave of my stomach, in the breast fur of this leopard. “I am so sorry.” The animal stands and stretches and vanishes.